A Bloodsmoor Romance Read Free Page B

Pennsylvania); that he assiduously courted her, until her virgin heart was won; that they were wed, and came to dwell here in Bloodsmoor, some twenty-three years before that autumn of 1879, with which this narrative begins.
    On several acres of particularly scenic land, part wooded, and part meadow, belonging to the Kidde­master estate, the devoted young couple established their residence, enjoying the occupancy of an eight-sided domicile of Mr. Zinn’s own design, which Mrs. Zinn’s munificent father financed. There, in that remarkable dwelling place—known locally as the Octagonal House, and, later, to be avidly written of, by journalists seeking to portray the complexity of Mr. Zinn’s genius to their disparate readership—four healthsome, and angelic, infant girls were born; to which bountiful household there was, in 1873, added an additional child, the orphan’d Deirdre Bonner.
    Whilst this happy family life blossomed, with very few incursions of ill-fortune, save some three or four miscarriages suffered by Mrs. Zinn, and the common run of illnesses, there was pursued, with marked singleness of purpose, and unswerving dedication, John Quincy Zinn’s vocation of invention, which the modest gentleman was wont to call mere “tinkering.” (“For only God invents, ” Mr. Zinn quietly asserted.)
    To those readers whose grasp of history is so deficient that the name John Quincy Zinn means very little to them, it will perhaps be of interest to learn that the distinguished inventor George Washington Gale Ferris believed Mr. Zinn to be “one of the most remarkable men of his acquaintance”; and that Mr. Hannibal Goodwin praised his “tireless, questing, resolutely natural mind.” That brilliant, albeit somewhat eccentric, Swedish scientist John Ericsson, spoke privately of John Quincy Zinn as an “equal,” as did Ralph Waldo Emerson, on at least one recorded occasion. (It was unfortunate indeed that Mr. Emerson, being of the poetic, and not the mathematical, genius, could not grasp, and consequently felt the necessity to disparage, certain of Mr. Zinn’s most challenging projects—the experimentation with the perpetual-motion machine, for instance. Yet, in a much-priz’d letter of 1869, found in the inventor’s workshop after his death, Mr. Emerson declared himself an “admirer” of Mr. Zinn, for the “very doggedness of his passion for Truth.”)
    A naturally inspired teacher, as informed by Love as by Intellect—a near-divine intelligence—an inventor of rustic, but original, genius—a Saint in his purity, as in his zeal: so John Quincy Zinn was praised, by divers gentlemen, during his long and productive lifetime. Charles A. Dana lauded Mr. Zinn, whom he had never met, as the single personage “hailing from that Transcendentalist tribe, who had contributed something worthwhile to our civilization.” Mr. Samuel Clemens, an enthusiast of invention in general, had naught but admiration for certain of Mr. Zinn’s numerous “domestic” items—the automatic hair clippers, for instance, and the rotary toothbrush, the which an embarrassed John Quincy Zinn had no great pride in, and would as soon have forgotten!—these “tinkerer’s toys” being, in his censorious eyes, quite contemptible, when set beside his more ambitious projects.
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    IT WAS ONE of the first questions put to John Quincy Zinn, by the journalist Adam Watkins, in 1887, as to why he had applied for so very few patents; for was it not a common practice, on the part of his fellow inventors, to file their applications with the United States Patent Office, on the slightest pretext? Many of the inventors being sadly deluded, in their estimation of their own originality and genius!
    Mr. Zinn’s reply to this impertinent query was a simple one, yet not lacking in dignity: “Perhaps, Mr. Watkins, I am somewhat less